Did anti-Kennedy politics in Dallas play major role in murder?

Updated 4:37 pm, Friday, October 18, 2013

Dallas seethed with John F. Kennedy hatred even as Kennedy ran for president in 1960.

The mayor (Earl Cabell), the leading Baptist minister (W.A. Criswell), a newspaper board chairman (Ted Dealey), the city's wealthiest businessman (H.L. Hunt), a Dallas congressman (Bruce Alger) and a high-profile military general (Edwin Walker) who retired rather than obey his commander in chief all helped to build Dallas' reputation as the most virulent anti-Kennedy city.

In general, they mostly feared the U.S. Supreme Court's racial integration of schools. With Kennedy supporting broader civil rights, Dallas' leadership portrayed the president as soft on communism, equating communism with integration. The communist goal, they believed, was to weaken America by mixing the races.

The atmosphere, as portrayed in “Dallas 1963” by authors Bill Minutaglio, a former San Antonio Express-News staff writer, and Steven L. Davis, longtime curator at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, is meant to seem extreme and personal. But it is not that much different in tone from the kind of anti-Barack Obama hatred that simmers in many places today.

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The authors build their case on Dallas by recounting incident after incident. Among the most visible signs of anti-Kennedy fervor were the “mink coat” mob attack on Kennedy running mate Lyndon Baines Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, in downtown Dallas the night before the November 1960 election; the verbal criticism right in Kennedy's face by the Dallas Morning News' Dealey; the attacks led by former Gen. Walker against troops protecting the first University of Mississippi black student; and the physical assaults against United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson.

Underlying it all were coordinated campaigns of radio shows, church sermons and public assemblies aimed at stopping integration, eroding support for Kennedy's re-election and repressing Catholics and Jews.

But was Dallas' poisonous atmosphere the reason Kennedy was assassinated there on Nov. 22, 1963?

The authors avoid posing the direct “Did Dallas kill Kennedy?” question, it seems, because a connection cannot be proved. Kennedy's staff feared Dallas ahead of the November 1963 visit, but the people they were afraid of were not involved in the shooting.

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Lee Harvey Oswald, as a confused, pro-communist loner and frustrated attention-seeker, had no known association with Dallas' anti-Kennedy ringleaders. Oswald had failed in his assassination attempt against the anti-communist obsessed Walker in April 1963, using the same rifle he later used at the Texas School Book Depository building, where he went to work a month before Nov. 22.

Walker and Kennedy were high-profile political enemies. Kennedy had ordered Walker's arrest in Mississippi. Both Kennedy and Walker, however, were anti-Fidel Castro, while Oswald was pro-Castro.

Despite the lack of a direct connection between Dallas politics and Oswald, the JFK assassination nevertheless exposed the city's extreme anti-Kennedy fervor, its police-protected dens of sin (including Jack Ruby's strip clubs), its religious hypocrisies, and the intentional, repressive, sharp divide in living standards between Dallas' whites and blacks.

That situation alone is worth this book. Minutaglio and Davis effectively tell that valuable story, chronically weaving together episodes and characters from 1960 to 1963 with documented research. The authors balance the narrative with the stories of the people, including black minister H. Rhett James, activist Juanita Craft and Jewish retailer Stanley Marcus, who tried to fight for civil rights and more sophisticated global views against the stronger, reactionary political and economic forces.

Dallas didn't kill Kennedy, at least not directly. But “Dallas 1963” clearly explains why the city's leaders deserved the shame that followed. History has shown that Dallas' leaders were on the wrong side of history in all of their issues.

dhendricks@express-news.net

A conversation and book-signing with Steven L. Davis and Bill Minutaglio is set for 4 p.m. Thursday at the Witliff Collections at Texas State University-San Marcos.